The Work Bubble

06:50
My alarm clock goes off.
It's remarkable that I managed to even fall asleep this morning.

Usually I wake up at around 10-11am, but today is different. Today I have important business to attend to and I need to be there at 08:00. (No it's not a court hearing but it involves sitting in front of a computer for 6 hours.)

I roll over and look out the window onto the street below.
Men in long sleeve button on shirts and backpacks walk unnaturally fast along the footpath as if their livelihood depended on it. (Which is probably true)
It's only natural that in a city filled with office towers that you find office workers; but what really hits me is that during my time in South East Asia, I have never actually witnessed the modern ritual of the morning rush hour as I have been operating on a very different schedule.

I want to talk about this because I back home in Christchurch, I lived a very different lifestyle. I used to spend the majority of the day inside an office building, largely isolated from everything else that occurred in the city. I used to partake in the commuter ritual twice a day and it was just a normal part of my life. I saw Christchurch from the perspective of an office worker.

There were times where I would find myself at home or in town during a weekday (or at least not at work) for whatever reason and I would feel like some kind of unemployed junkie slob. This belief was probably instilled from a young age back when I was in primary school where the kids who bunked school were labelled as the 'bad apples' who had no future. For whatever reason, that belief persisted into adulthood and even something as innocent as taking time off on annual leave and going into town during the daytime had me feeling like a wreck.

It's August 2018 and I now find myself in Kuala Lumpur. On one particular day I woke up at 11:00am, watched Youtube videos, played guitar, and ate breakfast cereal for dinner before going back to bed at 2am- all without even leaving the hostel.
It's at the extreme end for me but throughout the past few weeks, my day-to-day lifestyle has largely been about waking up sometime after 08:30, walking/driving around, taking photos, eating food and then going to bed at various hours of the night/morning. I am displaying the true qualities of an unemployed man. - A man who's spent the same money on whisky as he has on food over the past two days.

That said however, I have a foreign passport and this somehow grants me the unique status of being unemployed but without the stigma. (It also eliminates the stigma attached to drinking corn flavoured milk-based drinks outside a playground)

The only time I've seen corn in SE Asia is in a can or in a shrink wrapped plastic bag.

Throughout my travels in Indonesia, Singapore and now Malaysia, I have seen things from the perspective of a backpacker. There are many different ways of perceiving a particular place, which all depend on how your life is structured and how you fit within that society. Our lifestyles and daily patterns create the lens with which we perceive our environment. To truly judge a place fairly, one must take the time to experience it from different angles.  When you say a particular place is boring, ask yourself "Is it really"?
Perhaps it is you who is boring.


As a traveller, I have access to the widest lens of them all and it is only a matter of choosing to use it.

Now I see why they say it changes your perspective.

I paid way too much for this perspective